The Reindeer People (27 page)

'Whatever made you speak our that way?' she demanded angrily. Snatching up a cup, she dipped up some of the tea she had set to steep earlier.

'Whatever made you keep silent?' he returned, his eyes gone flinty.

The tea was cold and bitter in Tillu's mouth as she met his stare.

Heckram assented silently. There was a peace to the thickly falling curtain of white flakes that he was reluctant to disturb. All day he had sensed the snow coming. The thick clouds had been snagged on the near crest of the mountain like a swatch of gray woolen stuff. All day the softening snow had been slogging underfoot, sinking undetectably, glistening on the trodden paths but white and blue-shadowed under the trees. The reindeer had grazed easily, nuzzling the soft wet snow from tender moss, or reaching their shaggy necks to nibble the suddenly tender tips of the birches and willows. Even the sunset had not brought the cold back. The snow that fell now was wet, sticking to the branches of the trees but doomed to melt before noon tomorrow.

Heckram and Lasse sat back to back in a crude shelter of branches leaned against a tumble of jutting gray boulders and shist, memorial of some glacier's ancient passage. The tangle of branches kept out most of the snow, but not the diffused light of the overcast moon or the soft placidity of the snowy night.

For the first time in many days, Heckram felt at peace with himself. Here at the winter pasturage there were no reminders of pain and failure. But for Lasse's company, it was like any other early spring he had passed in the mountains. They hadn't bothered to bring a skin tent with them, but only sleeping hides sewn into a sack. The bunched hides were beneath him now, atop a cushioning pad of pine boughs. The night was too mild and Heckram too comfortable for him to think of crawling into his bed and sleeping. He would doze back to back with Lasse, occasionally stirring to look out on the gray and brown backs of the forty-odd animals scattered across the slope below them.

A soft, almost warm wind crept through the trees, now parting the snow flurries, now swirling the falling flakes more thickly than ever. The steady fall of the white stuff was almost as restful as sleeping. Heckram was not sure he was awake when he heard Lasse's whispered 'What's that?'

Heckram cleared his throat quietly. 'What's what?' he murmured softly. He squinted his eyes, tried to focus his gaze through the falling snow. He could see nothing. Confirming his own lesser senses were the peaceful attitudes of the animals below. They were not milling in agitation or muttering to one another in their coughing grunts. Whatever had disturbed Lasse had nor bothered them at all.

'There. Hear that?' Lasse whispered.

'Just the wind,' Heckram muttered irritably. The wind had many notes on a night such as this. It soughed through bare branches, overbalanced snow loads on heavy ones to make soft plopping sounds, and set smaller limbs and twigs to creaking and clattering softly against one another. Lasse should know those sounds as well as Heckram did himself.

He tried to go back to sleep, but found himself annoyingly alert, listening for whatever peculiar note had roused Lasse. The wind blew harder, the snow swirled and for one moment seemed to coalesce into a crouching wolf by a pale-trunked birch, but the next swirl of wind dispersed it and revealed the cheat of an old lightning-blasted stump. Heckram sighed, letting the tension ease out of his back. Was he a child to be spooked by shadows and shapes in the night?

Lasse's back was still tight against his. 'See anything?' Heckram asked, his deep voice soft in the night.

'I almost did. I mean, I thought I did. Like the biggest wolverine ever made, but white, every bit of it. Just the snow playing tricks on me.'

'Moonlight through clouds on new snow will do that,' Heckram acceded. Silence followed his words, falling and drifting as deep as the snow. His eyelids began to sag again.

'What will you do when we go back?' Lasse asked suddenly.

Heckram opened his eyes, frowned into the night. 'Do? What do we always do in spring? I'll put my winter gear up on the rack, load my summer gear onto a harke or two, and follow the herd. What will you do?'

'The same, I suppose.' Lasse sighed. Heckram felt it more than heard it. 'I'll spend the first day or so listening to my grandmother recount every little incident that occurred while we were gone. And the next few days trying to account for every moment that I was up here, while she imagines a dozen things wrong with every reindeer I've tended.'

Heckram nodded. 'There's a lot of silences up here. But all the talk when I get home somehow seems lonelier than this.'

Lasse paused, considering the sense of his words. Then: 'Won't it be strange for you, to go back to your own hut in the talvsit? You'll be going back to silences.'

'Yes.' Heckram bit the word off short. 'But it will only be for a night or so, and then we'll be off for the tundra.'

'But you'll be taking your own tent this time, won't you? The one Elsa and your mother made?'

'I suppose.' After avoiding these thoughts for days, the questions stung like fresh scratches. He realized suddenly that his guilt cut more sharply than his grief now. And knew in the same moment that while his grief might fade with time, the guilt he felt would not. It would not be any easier to meet Missa's eyes when he returned. Kuoljok's were even worse, for the death of his daughter had turned the old man's mind. When he looked at Heckram, he did not seem to see him at all. When he spoke to him, he looked through or beyond him. Neither one had ever spoken a word of blame; they didn't need to. Joboam's accusation that night had been enough. He remembered, sometimes, that Missa had spoken out against Joboam's words. When he did, he took comfort from it, but could find no case from his own self-accusations.

Lasse had fallen silent, but hadn't relaxed his vigil. The sleep that had come so easily moments before now eluded Heckram. His temples began to ache as his thoughts raced around and around like reindeer in a sorting pen. Around and around and around, pounding like rolling thunder, but finding no escape. Who had killed Elsa, and why? Joboam, he wanted it to be Joboam; he wanted a reason to challenge the man and unleash his fury and guilt on him.

But what if it were not Joboam? Sometimes in the night, it seemed impossible that Joboam could have hurt Elsa. Had he not been courting her just a few months ago? No herdman would kill a woman he wanted. He might try to lure her away from the man she had joined, with gifts and sweet words. There was nothing dishonorable in that. But why would any man destroy a woman he desired? For Joboam to have killed Elsa made no sense. Maybe Heckram only suspected him because he had always hated Joboam, and longed for a reason to act on that hate. The other herdfolk, true to their tradition, had set the death aside in their minds. Elsa had died; no one had seen, so no one could say what had killed her. They did not feel pressed, as Heckram did, to find something or someone to blame, to make someone pay for Elsa's death. Such was not their way. It should not have been Heckram's way. Yet he hungered for vengeance as a wolf hungers for meat in the dead of winter. The aching need for revenge set him apart, made him a stranger among his own folk and put lines upon Ristin's brow. Yet he could not turn his thoughts away from the unfairness of that death. Someone must pay.

But if not Joboam, then who? There was no answer to that. Had Elsa made an enemy he knew nothing about? Had it been a single marauder, one of those wild men old women spoke of, on late evenings around the open fires during the migration times? They were supposed to come by darkness, to carry off young women for mates. He had always thought them scaretales, nothing but a woman's device to keep her daughters from straying too far from the fire on warm spring nights.

His temples were thrumming. He reached up to touch his own face, felt the deep thought wrinkles between his brows, but could not remember how to smooth them out. Around and around and around. A demon, perhaps, as Rolke had suggested on that horrible night. Heckram did not know if he believed in demons anymore. Yet if ever he had seen a demon's work, it was what had been done to Elsa.

He closed his eyes against the swirling snow. The peace had fled from it. Now it danced before him, a demon that wrought itself over and over into images of Elsa. Again and again he saw her shattered hand lift in that terrible greeting. Slowly he drew his knees up to his chest, curved his neck down to rest his forehead on his knees. His body felt hard and hollow, like a sucked out marrow bone, a thing thrown aside.

Lasse spoke softly, without moving, 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to remind you again.'

'It's all right,' Heckram lied. His voice came out hoarse and thick. Sometimes he regretted letting Lasse come to know him so well. To grieve was bad enough. To know that the friend who sat back to back with him knew the depth of his pain did not ease it. It subtly intensified it.

Back to back they stiffened simultaneously, speaking no word as they listened to the soft drumming that suddenly filled the night. Had it just begun, or had it only now increased in volume so they were aware of it? Its rhythm was one piece with the night. The sound was sourceless, eternal, soft and yet undeniable. 'Heckram,' Lasse began softly.

'Shh,' the older man cautioned him. Neither one moved. The drumming went on, in infinite variations that yet formed an elaborate pattern. Heckram could imagine the fingers on the drumhead, tapping, brushing, rapping, moving from the edge of the tight-stretched hide into the center and then back again. An old image from a time he had thought forgotten came suddenly.

It had been a night in fall, on the trek back from the summer grazing grounds. He had been small, still looking up to his mother, and his legs had ached from walking all day. The smell of death was in the unseasonably warm air. Behind them, on the tundra, like scattered berries from a leaking basket, were the bodies of the reindeer that had fallen to the plague. Their bellies were bloated and their legs stuck up stiffly at obscene angles from their bodies. Flies buzzed audibly in the twilight.

Around a large fire the herdfolk had gathered, circling in rows around Nadunin the Najd. The najd's hair was streaked with white and hung long and wild past his face. He knelt on the hide of a white reindeer, so close to the fire that sweat streamed down his seamed and wrinkled body. He was clad in a loincloth of twisted yellow leather and his skin was a sallow brown like old bones moldering by a stream bank. His flesh was tight over his bones; Heckram had watched his ribs move with his breath. His kobdas was before him, and its strange voice filled the night. He tapped it with his hammerlike drumstick, making it cry out, now loudly, now softly. Gods were painted on the drumhead in red alder-bark juice, and also the Trollskott, the emblem used to inflict harm on the herds of an enemy.

The herdfolk ringed him; men, women, and children, gathered to see if respite might be gained through magic. Not far from this night's resting place was an ancient seite. They passed it every year on their annual migration. The great gray stone streaked with black reared up from the earth, jutting out of the tundra, visible for miles in any direction. Over the years streaks of color and bits of fluttering cloth had been added to it by passing peoples, enhancing its mystical appearance. No one gave a name to it. It was a seite, a place of power, a stone idol erected by the mother earth herself, beyond the worship or appeasement of men. Earlier today they had watched Nadunin as he took an antler cut from a plague-killed reindeer and rubbed it over the surface of the seite. Eight times he had circled the seite, dragging the clacking antler against its rough surface, making one circuit for each season of the year. At the end of the final circuit, he had broken a tip from one antler prong and buried the rest in the gravelly clay at the foot of the seite. The tiny bit of antler prong he had taken back to the camp. All day Nadunin had sat before his fire, making his sorcery, singing his magic into the prong in a monotonous joik. With his knife he had worked into its brown surface special symbols of his trade. No one had disturbed the old najd or asked him what came next. His was the magic; they could but witness it.

When he had begun to gather dung and dried moss and bits of sticks for a fire that evening, all the herdfolk had wordlessly joined in his task. Soon the heap was mounded taller than a man, and they had watched him start the fire in the old way, with his own firebow. His bow was a rib, and the string on it was sinew. Heckram had heard older boys say that his firebow had been made from the body of the old najd before him. He had never doubted it. When the smoke had wafted, then billowed, from his bow's work, the herdfolk had gathered closer. The najd sat very close to the fire. He set the bit of antler, a charmed pointer of their fate now, atop the head of the red-figured drum and began to tap upon the skin with his little drum hammer.

With each tap of his hammer, the tiny charm skipped across the drum's surface, touching first the heel of this god, then the cheek of that one. Only the herdfolk's najd could know the meaning of its passage, and they watched, breathless, as the striking of his little bone hammer vibrated the surface. It skated, it danced, it jounced, and the sweat poured from the najd's skin. His eyes were far, far, and his lips moved soundlessly as he drummed. Closer and ever closer to the Trollskott the charm skipped. Finally it settled on the red and black figure and clung there. Louder became the drumming, the little hammer striking the drumskin incessantly, but the hopping, jumping charm would not be budged from its chosen spot.

The words of Nadunin's chant began to be heard, breathless at first, then taking strength and filling the night. The essence of the sacred herbs he had ingested while making the charm could be smelled in the sweat that streamed down his ribs and the hollow track of his spine. His words were not in the language the herdfolk spoke to one another in their daily doings, but the tone was clear. He importuned, he pleaded, he begged, but still the charm clung stubbornly to the Trollskott. Then, with a dullness more deafening than the sharp thumpings that had preceded it, the drumhead split. The gap in the stretched leather opened as suddenly as a good knife opens the belly of a rabbit, racing from the hammer's head to cross the drum and open a mouth in the Trollskott. The Trollskott swallowed the fate of the herdfolk. Drum and najd were suddenly silent.